Show #2584: Saturday 9th March 2024 - Private Party / King Hannah / The Darling Buds
Adam Walton, BBC Radio Wales, 9th March 2024: Private Party interview / The Long Song - King Hannah / Behind The Track - The Darling Buds 'Hit the Ground' / Gareth Potter Selects...
Listen again via BBC Sounds here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001x3j6
PLEASE NOTE: This isn’t an official BBC / BBC Wales post. All words / opinions expressed here are my own.
Despite the fact that it eats into important time when I could be wandering Faerûn playing Baldur's Gate 3, I do enjoy trying to gather my thoughts about each week's show... before all thought and meaning is blown away on the breeze.
This week's special guests are Swansea-ish's indie pop prodigies Private Party. They're not flavour of the month; their faces don't (currently) fit; they're pretty useless at shouting about themselves on social media; they seem to be only remotely interested in writing and recording songs that sound like bittersweet webs hung with choruses of glistening dewdrops.
For all of these reasons - and more - I love them very much. There's a rare chemistry in their make-up. When bands say that all the members have different musical tastes, but then everything congeals into something mundane and brown gravy, well that isn't what's happening here.
Guitars are fractal parts that sound like Johnny Marr depping for Slint, and just as I'm congratulating myself on that fearfully uncontemporary - but accurate - analogy, a guitar solo bursts out of the speakers wearing the Isley Brothers' 'Summer Breeze' as its fancy dress. And pulls it off.
Bands are often elevated by constituent shapes not fitting together perfectly, according to the standard recipe. I remember hearing to The Flaming Lips for the first time and thinking that they sounded like a Vulcan mind meld of disparate characters in a musical Cluedo, or a late 90's RPG (hey... BALDUR'S GATE!) but that the magic was absolutely in the tension inherent in a lack of committee.
Wow. That's a bad sentence, even for me.
Private Party's songs hang on Violet Sourbutt's voice. Her lyrics are unguarded, unvarnished, lovelorn angst... affectation-free. 'Bahama Mama' is probably the greatest indie pop single I've heard since I was 16, wearing out cassettes that came for free on the cover of NME or Sounds (trying to peel them off without ripping the cover... always failing).
How a band whose average age is below that of Klopp's kindergarten bench can sound so suffused with the spirit of Orange Juice, early Go-Betweens, The Sundays, The Darling Buds and The Vaselines is completely beyond my ken, Ken.
'Space Cowboy' could have come from ‘Hatful of Hollow’, for crying out loud.
Of course I am in danger of imposing my musical tastes and experiences on a band who don't deserve to be weighed down by them. 1987 was when I was the same age as this band are now. But there's much more to these songs than them being my musical madeleines.
They're entirely contemporary, more in the vein of Beabadoobee's earliest bedroom recordings or Billie Eilish's nascent releases.
But then Maxmimus fires a volley of intense punk-fired drumming across our bows and things shift into a different register.
They've recorded and released this very special debut album - 'Borderless' - themselves, as part of a college project. So the recording is sort of lo fi and imperfect, but high fidelity in ideas, tunes and heart, which makes is so so imperfectly perfect to my ears.
I know what I mean. I think.
And they're completely unspoilt by anyone else's interfering fingers. Their streaming figures suggest that their mates can't afford Spotify accounts, which - given the paucity of anywhere near decent employment opportunities their generation have, thanks to a government that keeps unemployment figures down by strong-arming human beings into dead-end jobs - is understandable.
Another echo to C-86.
If you're not swooning when 'Could've Asked Sooner' floats off into the ether 80 seconds in, we can't be friends. Not ever. Sorry not sorry.
I said - somewhere else - that they're C-86 for the Zero Hours generation and I could have just written that, really, and saved us all the bother of the preceding caffeine-fulled rambling.
Please love them as much as they deserve to be loved.
I'm not sure how sustainable my 'Behind The Track' feature is. Owen from Catatonia guided us through some of the magic behind 'Strange Glue' last week, and this week another seminal Welsh legend, Andrea Lewis from Newport's The Darling Buds, gives us the low-down on 'Hit The Ground'.
The Darling Buds were one of the first Welsh bands I ever saw, who weren't a mates' band in school. As Andrea shook her head and sank her glorious pop songs into my heart at the Tiv in Buckley in - I think - 1990, I realised that coming from Wales wasn't something to be ashamed of (musically-speaking) and that it didn't necessarily mean you had to be hobbled by Cwm Dancing and sheep-shagging jokes from the national music papers' headline writers.
'Hit The Ground' is Ramones-fulled, girl pop quicksilver. It's a classic and for very good reason. We also discover that Andrea's favourite flavoured Chewit is the correct favourite flavour of Chewit.
Elsewhere The Long Song this week is going to fill your heart with so much glow you'll be able to read by the light when you go to bed. King Hannah are based in Liverpool, but Hannah is from Tan Lan in northeast Wales. And like anyone who comes from the part of Wales that's most frequently over-looked by the commentariat, no one's likely to notice that she's Welsh until King Hannah have picked up a No.1 album and / or a Grammy Award.
They're signed to the truly legendary City Slang record label. Their new single 'Big Swimmer' is so incandescently beautiful, calling to mind Neil Young in acoustic mode; Mazzy Star; Big Thief when they're lucid dreaming; Cowboy Junkies and Sharon Van Etten. Oh, and Sharon guests on vocals.
Has that been mentioned in the Welsh media, yet?
No, thought not.
Please do send new music excellence to me via the BBC Introducing Uploader or as a download link to my BBC email address. You'll work it out. It has a dot between my first name and my last name.
Keep on trucking x
THIS WEEK’S PLAYLIST
The Nightmares - 'From Above (Zetra Remix)'
Newport
Twst - 'Off - World (Babii’s Fantasy)'
Barry
http://instagram.com/twstwstwstwst
Private Party - 'Could've Asked Sooner'
Swansea-ish
Amser - 'Under the Earth'
Australia / Cardiff
http://instagram.com/itsamser
Group Listening - 'New Brighton'
Colwyn Bay / Cardiff
http://grouplistening.bandcamp.com
Phoebe Platt - 'Get Out My Way'
Pembroke Dock
Joe Blow & Mr Substance - 'One In A Million ft Mighty Mouse & Risk-1'
Barry / Cardiff
Jessika Kay - 'So Right'
Cardiff
Mantis - 'Sandy'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=100082290872117
SOCKiTTOME - 'run run'
Lampeter
http://facebook.com/itsSOCKiTTOME
Shell - 'Give Yourself Away'
Dinas Powys
https://www.bestliferecords.com/products/shell-the-need-to-separate-lp-blr013
Midding - 'White Walls'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/middingband
Teddy Hunter - 'Daylight'
Cardiff
http://teddyhunter.co.uk
HARD DRIVE DEEP DIVE #002'
Bluetrain - 'Parade'
Surrey / Pembrokeshire
Campfire Social - 'Swim Swam Swum'
Chester / Newbridge
http://campfiresocial.co.uk
THE LONG SONG #034... KING HANNAH 'BIG SWIMMER'
King Hannah - 'Big Swimmer'
Tan Lan / Liverpool
http://kinghannah.com
Amanda Whiting - 'Liminal'
Cardiff
Pen Dub - 'Walk With Me ft. Lionel Nova'
Morfa Nefyn
http://pendub.bandcamp.com
Fabiana Palladino - 'Stay With Me Through The Night'
Cardiff parentage
http://fabianapalladino.com
Mr Bewlay - 'Worst of All Women'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/mrbewlay
Mantaraybryn - 'No Economy'
Cardiff
http://facebook.com/Mantaraybryn
Conqueror Worm - 'Bloated Worm'
Bristol / Cardiff
Cyn Cwsg - 'Lôn Gul'
Y Gogledd
http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=61555752064160
MAGI - 'Never Let You Go ft. Olivia Locke'
Pontypridd
http://linktr.ee/magi_sounds
Lucas Alexander - 'Bad Boy Dub ft. Local'
Cardiff / Jamaica
http://facebook.com/DjLucasAlexander
Edit The Tide - 'Unite And Rebel'
Bridgend
http://facebook.com/editthetideband
These Five Years - 'Medicine'
Barry / Cardiff
http://facebook.com/thesefiveyears
firebrandboy - 'stacks'
Penarth
Anthony Reynolds - 'Le Courrier'
Cardiff
http://anthonyreynolds.net
BEHIND THE TRACK #004... THE DARLING BUDS 'HIT THE GROUND'
The Darling Buds - 'Hit The Ground'
Newport
https://www.facebook.com/TheDarlingBudsOfficial
LICO - 'Casanova'
Merthyr Tydfil
http://facebook.com/wearelico
INTERVIEW WITH... PRIVATE PARTY
Private Party - 'BAHAMA MAMA'
Swansea-ish
Private Party - 'Wither'
Private Party - 'An Invitation [radio edit]'
GARETH POTTER SELECTS... EVE ADAMS 'Kookie Talk'
Eve Adams - 'Kookie Talk'
Cardiff
Rhys Llwyd Jones - 'pan ddaw yfory'
Cardiff
http://instagram.com/rhysllwydjones
SHOW STATS
333 diff songs/ 373 Total. 269 Artists in 10 shows since 1st, Jan '24 (~Songs per:37, Unique artists per:27) Welsh:99% Cymraeg:11% (feat. lyrics in Welsh); Source: Uploader:43%, Direct:17%, Bought:15%, Plugger:21%, Commission:3%
Comprehensive Session / Interview List: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1w-rIPj0l0QhUcbEm08PUPLUWh-416mwlteG_8wpNWtQ/edit?usp=sharing
Subscribe to my Substack: https://adamwalton.substack.com
Adam Walton